It’s Small Business Saturday and The Loving Nest prepared 3 special deals just for you! 2 Private Infant Massage Classes for just $99 Newborn Package now for just $170 2 Parenting Workshops for $30 Just add these classes to your cart and your discount will automatically be applied! Purchase until next Saturday, December 5th, but you can schedule into 2016. Home-visits will be scheduled according to availability. The parenting workshops will happen in Framingham on December 1st and 15th and in North Attleboro on December 2nd! Please e-mail any questions about this sale/promotion to: info@thelovingnest.com Shop...

Orange is an important color in our lives. I have always enjoyed its brightness and vibrance. It makes me think happy thoughts. But it was not until I started to attend college that it really took on a personal meaning. I studied Psychology. In Portugal, at least, orange is the color of psychology majors. It became my color too. I met my husband, also a psychology major, in college. For our wedding, we had an orange/white/silver color scheme, of course. So far, orange was part of my major milestones: college and marriage. But when I found out I was pregnant with my first child and she was due in October, it gain an even bigger significance. I was having a little Fall pumpkin! Now, orange is a simple reminder of all the things I love the most! It makes me smile every time I look at it. So, now that you know all about my orange craze, it’s easy to understand why I picked the color orange for my first Re-Play starter set! They have so many amazing colors, but this one, was mine! Are you familiar with the Re-Play brand? Did you know all their products are made from recycled milk jugs? Re-Play is a family owned company that manufactures, assembles, and tests all their products in the USA. Their products strive for sustainability by using recycled products, safety by meeting all FDA requirements, functionality, durability, and affordability. All this, while being a company that is socially conscious, providing employees flexibility around their family and lives. Now, I would say that is pretty impressive and a model which other business owners...

I love taking pictures! For years I have been the designated “photographer” for my family, being responsible for snapping all the pictures during travels and family events. Even though I enjoyed taking pictures, many times I would end up frustrated with the results and thinking: “why are these pictures not capturing what I am seeing?” I used a point and shoot for years, but when I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband thought he would solve my picture frustrations with a nice Nikon DSLR as my birthday present that year. I was so excited to get started with my new camera! For sure my pictures would look better now! For sure it would capture what I was seeing! I read the manual several times, practicing while reading; I watched the DVD; I even did a 3h workshop in Boston. Although the pictures were definitely getting better, I was still not 100% happy with the end results. When I saw that Nicole Starr Photography was doing a workshop on how to use your DSLR, I knew I had to go! I had been following her work online and loved her airy and bright pictures! I enrolled in the workshop and began the journey into, what I like to call, the “Nicole Starr experience”. If you have worked with Nicole in the past, you know how she is all about the little details. Everything she does, she does well and beautifully. Starting with a pre-workshop questionnaire so she was aware of all the participants’ camera models and what they were looking to get out of the workshop, to creating a Facebook group for post-workshop follow-up....

Last night I held my daughter tighter as she fell asleep. I felt sad thinking that she will grow up in a world that is still full of hate, violence, and ignorance. I always thought my generation would have made some sort of positive impact in the world filling it with more love, justice, and empathy. But we are not there yet. We are still not there… While I was deeply saddened and sick to my stomach with the news that were coming from Paris, my 2 year-old daughter innocently kept playing and smiling, oblivious to the evils and dangers of the world. I wish I could keep it like that forever. How do you talk to your kids about these things? How do you assure them that they can feel safe, when deep down, you don’t feel safe yourself? How do you pass on the values you want to instill, like love, hope, and happiness while still acknowledging the hate, fear, and injustice that happens around the world? As a parent, you would do anything to protect your children from harm, grief or sadness. It’s hard enough to accept that bad things happen, like natural disasters, illness, accidents… But to still have to add to your list, preventable acts of hate and violence, is just cruel. We can not just accept as normal the possibility of losing our kids or our kids losing their parents to a random act of terrorism or gun violence. This should not be our new normal. It’s not just up to the world leaders to resolve these issues with politics and wars. It’s up to us. We deserve to raise our...